8.21.2016

Program

A program might be defined as coded or prearranged information that controls a process (or behavior) leading it towards a goal. The program contains not only the blueprint of the goal but also the instructions of how to use the information of the blueprint. A program is not a description of a given situation but a set of instructions. (p. 128) Adaptedness thus is an a posteriori result rather than an a priori goal seeking. For this reason the word teleological is misleading when applied to adapted features (p. 131)

Mayr, The idea of teleology, Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 53, No. 1 (Jan. - Mar., 1992), pp. 117-135

Purpose

A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement. He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realises a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which he must subordinate his will. And this subordination is no mere momentary act. Besides the exertion of the bodily organs, the process demands that, during the whole operation, the workman's will be steadily in consonance with his purpose. This means close attention. The less he is attracted by the nature of the work, and the mode in which it is carried on, and the less, therefore, he enjoys it as something which gives play to his bodily and mental powers, the more close his attention is forced to be. The elementary factors of the labour-process are 1, the personal activity of man, i.e., work itself, 2, the subject of that work, and 3, its instruments. (Marx, Capital, p. 198)

Mikhail Bakhtin

Activation of situated conceptualizations

When a situated conceptualization becomes active, it constitutes a rich source of prediction via this pattern completion inference mechanism. A situated conceptualization is essentially a pattern, namely, a complex configuration of multi-modal components that represent a familiar situation. When a component of this pattern matches something experienced in the environment, the larger pattern becomes active in memory. The remaining pattern components—not yet experienced—constitute inferences, namely, educated guesses about what might occur next. Because the remaining components co-occurred frequently with the perceived components in previous situations, inferring the remaining components is plausible. When a partially viewed situation activates a situated conceptualization, the conceptualization completes the pattern that the situation suggests.
http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/364/1521/1281.full.pdf+html?frame=sidebar

A kilobyte rewritable atomic memory

Kilobyte atomic memory. STM image (96 × 126 nm, I = 2.00 nA,V = +500 mV, T = 1.5 K) of a 1,016-byte atomic memory, written to a passage from Feynman’s lecture ‘There’s plenty of room at the bottom’. The various markers used are explained in the legend below the images. The memory consists of 127 functional blocks and 17 broken blocks, resulting in an over all areal density of 0.778 bits nm−2.

Nature nanotechnoly letters, July 18 2016

History of tax havens


  1. This paper examines the historical development of tax havens. The case for regulating tax havens has become an increasingly prominent issue for policy makers worldwide, especially in light of the current financial crisis.
  2. Modern tax havens can be organized into three groups: UK-based or British Empire- based tax havens, European havens, and thirdly new tax havens from the transitional economies in South America and Africa.
  3. Tax haven strategy developed piece by piece in different locations, often for reasons which had little to do with their ultimate use. Tax havens are a distinctly modern phenomenon, whose origins lie at the earliest in the late nineteenth century. Only during the second phase of their development, from the end of the First World War, did countries begin to develop comprehensive policies to become a tax haven.
  4. Since then, tax havens can be viewed as a distinct developmental state strategy that could have evolved only in the context of a robust international system of statehood, respectful of the sovereign right of states to write their own laws and within an integrated world market.
  5. Statistics suggest that tax havens have an extremely prominent role in the global financial system. They have become an important instrument of tax evasion worldwide and constitute the single largest drain on developing countries' economies.
  6. Today, the key issue regarding tax havens is their lack of transparency. Tax havens need to be regulated by an internationally agreed code of conduct that ensures the transparency of ownership and traceability of assets to their ultimate owners.
http://www.historyandpolicy.org/policy-papers/papers/history-of-tax-havens 

8.20.2016

Memory retrieval is memory creation


Activation (a) and the trace information sources formed in memory representation (b). When external information is provided, the part similar to it in the memory representation is activated (Terasawa, Creation theory of cognition: Is memory retrieved or created?, 2005, p. 147)

Convergence-divergence architecture

The convergence-divergence architecture can be used to recall memories prompted by a specific visual stimulus. In panels a and b, a certain incoming visual stimulus (selective set of small filled-in boxes) prompts forward activity in CDZs of levels 1 and 2 (bold arrows and filled-in boxes). In panel c, forward activity activates specific CDRs, and in panel d, retroactivation from CDRs prompts activity in early somatosensory, auditory, motor, and other visual cortices (bold arrows, filled-in boxes). Retroactivation generates displays in “image space” as well as movement (selective set of small filled-in boxes) (Damásio, Self comes to mind, 2010, p.115)

Bodily maps of emotions

Goals for productive discussions and nine talk moves

Wikkel house

8.18.2016

Operational architectonics

Fingelkurts, Andrew A, Fingelkurts, A. A., & Neves, C. F. H. (2013). Consciousness as a phenomenon in the operational architectonics of brain organization: Criticality and self-organization considerations. Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, 55, 13–31. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.chaos.2013.02.007 (p. 12)

More complex physical operations of the brain emerge from the collective activity of many neurons – neuronal assembly. It is well established, that single neurons (highly distributed along the cortex) can quickly become associated (or dis-associated) by synchronization of their activity and giving rise to functional transient assemblies (Kogan and Choraian, 1977; von der Malsburg, 1999). Anatomical connections are not necessarily important prerequisite for such synchronization; it is rather a stimulus (external – physical or internal – mental) and/or a task that is important and is the causal source of synchrony (see Ryder and Favorov, 2001). Each of these functional assemblies maintains discrete complex brain operations some of which may have already mental/subjective ontology in addition to their neurophysiological ontology (Tabl. 1): They process different attributes of object or environmental scene, thus being simple cognitive operations (Valera et al., 2001; Fingelkurts and Fingelkurts, 2003). The joint functionally connected activity of many neuronal assemblies produces already complex cognitive/mental operations3 (Tabl. 1; see also McIntosh, 1999, 2000). Each neuronal assembly makes a specific contribution to the performance of complex cognitive operation, and the contribution is determined by the position which a particular neural assembly occupies within the richly connected, parallel, and distributed brain system (see Petersen and Fiez, 1993). The temporal synchronization of many operations of local neuronal assemblies together (Operational Synchrony, OS) gives rise to a new level of brain abstractness – metastable4 brain states (for the review, see Fingelkurts and Fingelkurts, 2004). It is suggested that these metastable brain states or functional Operational Modules (OM), as we name them, underlie complex brain functions and/or mind complex operations (cognitive percepts and mental states that have representational nature)5. The sequence of these metastable OMs, thus, represents6 the stream of thoughts (Fingelkurts and Fingelkurts, 2001). It is only at this level of integration we may hope relate brain and mind through functional isomorphism principle (see Fingelkurts and Fingelkurts, 2004).

Fingelkurts, A. A, & Fingelkurts, A. A. (2005). Mapping of the brain operational architectonics. Authors' draft, p. 4.

How Brains Make Up Their Minds